Romani Rokkeripen To-divvus: The English Romani dialect and its contemporary social, educational and linguistic standing

Romani English

ABSTRACT

Gypsies are first recorded as having entered the British Isles in 1505 , and the first
written samples of their inflected speech known to -us date from 1542. Today, while
Romanes is still widely spoken in Britain, for the vast majority of Gypsies it is a
variety which might better be classified as a dialect of English than of Romanes, since
it consists of a vocabulary of items of Romanes origin adapted to English phonology
and a grammar derived almost wholly from the host language. In this paper, Kenrick
discusses the factors which appear to have brought about the loss of native morpho-
syntax and phonology and describes the sociolinguistic aspects of how the language
is transmitted from generation to generation, and in which situations it is used.

When the Romani (Gypsy) people left India around the seventh century
A.D. they took with them their language, and this language is still used by
over five million persons, ranging from the settled Gypsies of Eastern
Europe to the nomadic Kalderash of Western Europe and the Americas. In a
few instances the .spoken Romani language itself has died out, as with the
Boy ash in Romania - in others, it survives only as lexis, using the syntax,
morphology and phonology of the host language.

Such is the case in Armenia (Finck, 1907; Journal of the Gypsy Lore
Society, passim) and Jn Engfitn d. The language that is spoken by one
English Rom to another today is really a register of English ratlier than a dia-
lect of Romani. Forthis reason I havechosen to call it Romani English (parallel
to Jewish English) rather than English Romani. An example will illustrate.
RE The rackii chortd the iuvva
ENG The girl stole the money

The lexical morphemes are Romani (indeed all three date back to the
Indian period), but everything else is English, and the sentence could be
paralleled in other variants of English:
Jewish Eng. The shicksa ganav^d the gelt
Rhyming slang The gooseberry half-inched the bread
Army English The bint kiiftied the felus (the lexis is Arabic)

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Apart from the kxis, Romani English does not differ from the language
spoken by Gajo (non-Gypsy) people of similar class and education. Because
the Romanies travel from {dace to place they have less local dialect
influences in their speech than sedentary Gaje of the same class and educa-
tion. Nevertheless, there is enough dialect interference to mislead the
librarian or teacher ^o tries to record their speech, and this has perhaps
tempted Romanologues in the past to see vestiges of older syntax and
phonc^ogy. For example, the form yurr *ear' in John Brune's vocabulary
(Wood, 1973:122-130) is Surrey dialect, while durmick *cow' is still
common amongst country dwellers in both Surrey and Kent. So too,
*be lucky\ as a term of farewell, is not confined to Gypsies but is common
in East London and is probably a caique on Yiddish ED1TV^ 0V> T
{zayt gezint) rather than any Romani phrase.

There has been much debate on the origin of Romani English, and
several theories have been postulated; two of these must be considered
possible. The first is that the language began as a pidgin O^ter creole) in
use between the Romanies and the large numbers of En^ishmen who
joined their bands during the sixteenth century. It is true that many Gaje
did join the nomadic Romanies, to the extent that Queen Elizabeth I
imposed the death penalty for consorting with 'Egyptians' as they were
then called. However, we only have one recording of the speech of that
time (Crofton, 1907). This was probably taken down in England's French
cdonies at the time, and in any case it was in standard Romani with
Romani morphology. The next written record of Romani in England con-
taining sentences is in the nineteenth century (Smart and Crofton,
1875:1-5) so, without proof, this theory must remain a hypothesis.' In
modem times intemiarriage is rare and few Gaje tive alongside Roms, so
we cannot make a comparison. In one Kalderash family known to me, the
grandmother is of Maltese-Welsh origin and knew no Romani until her
teens, yet she keeps the distinction between voiced and unvoiced
phonemes (Jt/ier *house^lk€r *do') more than her offspring. This may suggest
that it is mixing daily with Gaje that changes the language rather than
intermarriage. On the other hand, she does not correct their speech, as did
her husband.

The second theory is that Romani gradually lost its distinctive syntax,
phonology and morphology, — in that order — during five hundred years
of contact with the host language. This, too, is a form of creolization,
but it is different from the emergence of a new tongue throu^ its use as
a bridge language between speakers of two different languages. English
Romani never had this role. In order to trade, the Romanies had to leam

81

English quickly, as, in addition to the linguistic handicap, they had to over-
come the reluctance of the Gaje to purchase from dark-skinned strangers
who perhaps brought the evil eye with their goods. We find in Western
Europe the nomad Kalderash and other groups speaking ten or more
languages for trading purposes, while there is no sign of their developing
a 'pidgin' for communication with the local population.

With this second theory, that of gradual change throu^ contact, we
do have parallels today, in particular in the Firmish dialect of Romani.
The younger Finnish Romanies use the Finnish phonological system,
unlike their grandparents. I have myself noticed the unvoicing of 'but'
to 'put' (many), in conformity with Firmish, and Valtonen (1970) notes
that Finnish vowel harmony is now adapted to what is called the low'
style of speech: The genitive suffix ^o has an alternative form -ko (used
after certain vowels, following the Finnish system) (see also Valtonen, this
volume , pp. 1 2 1 - 1 24).

There is, however, Uttle intermarriage but much social intercourse with
Gaje, as there are not large numbers of Gypsies living in any one town.
Apart from using Finnish in work relationships, much of the leisure time
is spent with Finnish speakers, and in these circumstances the majority
language begins to influence the mother tongue.

It is my belief that Romani English emerged in the same way, and the
extensive records of Gypsy speech in England in the nineteenth century
show that the middle-aged informants spoke a mixture of Eng^i^ and
Romani in the way that many young Finnish Roms mix Finnish and
Romani today. Some informants still spoke the inflected language:
(1874) bori shii se mande 'I am very cold' lit. 'great cold is on me'

(Borrow, 1919).
but the same writer also quotes many sentences n^ch have English syntax
and morphology, and I would class them as Romani En^ish.
It's my Dowel's kerimus 'It's my Lord's doing' {ib.)
Leland, in 1873, with a different group of Gypsies (Leland, 1874), found
grammatical flexions surviving only in the personal pronouns, and, as these
were not used consistently, it seems that the distinction between cases was
almost gone. So we find the dative case in
The chUlico pukkered lesco 'The bird spoke to him'
but the locative in

She pukkered tester 'She spoke to him'

Leland's informants had already lost the distinction between masculine
and feminine adjective endings, something that Valtonen (1970) points
out for Finnish Romani.

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Smart and Crofton (1875) in 1863 found the same state of affairs,
although with the aid of one old man they were able to reconstruct much,
though not aU, of the earlier grammatical structure of the language. This
old man stated

Kanna sas mandi a tickno, sar o pooro foiki rokerde tacho pooro Romani
lava

('When 1 was a young man, aU the old people spoke real old Romani words')
He, at least, thought that the last speakers to use Romani morphology in
England (apart from later immigrants) died at the beginning of the nine-
teenth century. He was probably a hundred years out ^s we find in the
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society this century many sentences in inflected
Romani remembered by informants.

One still hears talk of people who know *deep' Romani but on investiga-
tion this means they simply use more Romani lexis in their English speech.
The Romani language still survives in Wales, but those families there who no
longer use it do not speak Romani English among themselves - only English
or Welsh. They are aware of the existence of Romani English but use it
only mockingly.

It seems that in Spain, too, the Calo dialect of Romani is disappearing
and being replaced by a Spanish spoken with Romani words instead of
Castillian. We may wonder why it is only in Spain and England that this
has happened and why the change took place earlier in England. It is prob-
ably because there has been only limited new immigration since the first
groups arrived in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. This has meant that
in any marriage both partners had a common language other than Romani —
a language which they used in trading with the host community. The
English Gypsies moved around generally in groups of only two or three
families and would mix more with Gaje in leisure as well as at work. There
were few large settled communities as in Spain, where Romani was the
lariguage of the street and of the children - one factor in its preservation.

Elsewhere in Europe, two factors kept Romani alive - the commonness
of marriage between different branches of nomadic tribes where the new
couples had only Romani as their common language and the existence of
settled communities of Rom who created their own social life in villages
and quarters separate irom the Gaje who spurned their company outside
the necessities of economic relationships.

Nowadays, the everyday language in use among Ciypsies in England is
that of the surrounding urban or rural community in which they live and
work English In addition, they possess a special lexis of between 100 and
1000 words which they can use to replace the English equivalents when

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they want or need to. Thus a Gypsy talking to a Gajo has only one way to
express:

*give me the water*

but if he is talicing to another Gypsy he has two choices
'give me the v/^tex'/dei mandi the pani

/Whichever one he uses, the hearer will understand; so, unlike normal
j language usage, the choice of language (or rather, register) does not depend
upon the speaker's knowledge or assumption about the languages known by
the hearer. A Welshman, for example, is more likely to address an unknown
person in English than Welsh, assuming firstly that there is a 60% chance
that the hearer will be monoglot English-speaking and, secondly, that even
if he is a Welsh-speaker, he will understand English and carry out the request.
I feel that if we henceforth look upon Romani English (what the Gypsies
call pogadi Mb 'broken language') as a register of^gtish this will begin to
illuminate many problems. Treating it then as a register of English, I will
enumerate some of the circumstances in which it is used.

(1) For identification purposes: If a Gypsy is in, e.g. a cafe and thinks that
someone at the table is also a Romani, he will slip a word of Romani into
the conversation. For this purpose, he will often use a Romani word that is
identical with an English word so that if the other person is a Gajo, he can
rephrase the remark as an English sentence and not give away that he is a
Gypsy. For example, he can say

Mandy 11 pester for you '1 11 pay for you'

which could be rephrased, if the other man says 'what?', as

'Is that man pestering you?'

Occasionally, Gypsies will slip a Romani word into a conversation when

there is no doubt that the stranger is a Gajo and when the latter knows that

they are Romanies. This is a test to see whether the stranger is likely to be

friendly or hostile, since, if he knows a few conmion words like kritchma

'pubhc house', it is Ukely that he has Gypsy friends. In this way one can

identify a friendly vicar or garage mechanic before asking for help or

explaining one's problems.

(2) Romani English is used as a regist er i n_a jew trades or professions by
both Rom and _Gajo: Thus the register of English used by horse Klealers
contains Romani lexical items understood by the professionals but not by
the casual buyer. The register used also contains English words used with
special meaning, e.g., 'two and a half signifies 'two hundred and fifty
pounds*. It is via these trade registers that Romani words have spread into
market traders' jargon (and thence into ordinary English slang):

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It's a mazel it didn 't pani *It's luck it didn't rain'

mazel (Yiddish), pani (Romani)

(3) In song^: There are a few songs i^ich seem to have been composed
originally in Romani English - at least they are never sung in standard
English. These include J)n a Romani Rai Tm a Romani lord' and Can you
rocker Romani? 'Can you speak Romani?' The majority of songs in English
Romani, however, are translations of common English folk-songs or music-
hall songs of the nineteenth century. Here is one recorded a few years ago
in Barking (East London) with an English version (Kennedy, 1975:
Song 249).

Mandy hadajuk i keep my dogs and my ferrets too

and a kushtijuk O, I have them in my keeping.

He kept him in his keeping To catch good hares - all in the night

One Sunday night they went out While the gamekeeper lies sleeping.

walking

while the gavver mush was My dogs and I went out one night . . .'

sleeping. . .

The singer, a young girl, apparently thought Mandy was someone's name

(in fact, it is the Romani English word for *!') and foUows this thought in

the third line .

(4) In word-play: Comparing words and inventing new words in Romani
was a common pastime in the evenings before television sets began to
enter every trailer. Indeed, one has heard of competitions to see who knew
the most words (a unique phenomenon perhaps). There seems to be a para-
dox here that, while fundamental words like 'us' and 'am' have been bor-
rowed from English, a lot of energy is expended in coining new words such
as dickin* mokta 'television -lit. looking box' while European Rom are
quite happy to use the loan word television. One reason may be the need
for these words when Romani is used as a secret language (see below) but
many are formed as a pastime. One can only with difficulty visualize a
situation when a Gypsy might want to talk secretly about an elephant (given
by one informant as bori vangusta 'big finger').

(5) For self-identification as a group member: It has been observed by
Acton (1971) that at a wake, where the relatives and friends watch over
the body, the discussions of the good life and qualities of the deceased were
carried on entirely in Romani English. Here we have a large number of
Rom coming together, meeting their relatives pertiaps for the first time

85
in months and in emotional circumstances feeling that they are again part
of a large wamfi family. One can observe a similar phenomenon at a Jewish
wedding where, as the evening draws on, the waltz gives way to the hora and
Jewish English and Yiddish replace En^ish as the most heard languages.

(6) As a secret language: One can imagine the usefulness of a secret language
in circimistances such as when a policeman approaches a group of caravans
and asks to see someone's driving licence. A whispered word in Romani can
send one of the youths scurrying away to borrow a valid licence. Of course,
now that Gypsies are more integrated into society the uses of the language
change. When I first wrote on this topic (1971) I cited a court scene where
a lad accused of theft, was asked where he was hving and his mother shouted:
Don Y forget you got to 'ave a kenner (*house').

meaning that he should say he lived in the house of a relative as, if the magis-
trate found out that he lived in a trailer, bail might be refused. A week or so
before writing this article a similar, but different, scene took place, but here
the Gypsy concerned was in the town hall applying for planning permis-
sion to place his trailer on some land he had bought. Stumped by a question
from the council solicitor, he turned to his wife for prompting. She said
just one word, ker and her husband spoke out:
'I want to settle down and build a bungalow!*

Even those who heard the prompt, probably thought the woman was saying
'care' and not the Romani word for a house .^

For many Gypsies it is important that even the fact that they have a
secret language should be concealed. Here is another paradox: for them the
language is so secret that they carmot use it in public to say something
that they do not want the Gaje present to understand. A leading Gypsy
Council member has been criticized on several occasions vehemently for
speaking to other Gypsies in Romani while they were on delegations to
government and local bodies. By speaking Romani he was giving away the
fact that they had a secret language and - of course - the fact that he made
remarks to them in Romani after council officials had made certain proposi-
tions meant that the Gaje could deduce what he was saying even without
knowing the language. The secretness of the language is such that young
children are discouraged from giving words even to such friendly persons as
volunteer teachers on the trailer sites. Many debates have taken place in
Gypsy political circles on whether Romani publications should be
encouraged and the circulation of a bilingual reading book was a prime
factor in causing a split in the largest educational welfare organization
working with Gypsies.

86

Nevertheless there are books from which the language can be leamt, and
a prison officer was able to provide a translation of a letter in a recent
murder case where threats to mutter someone were used to try and get a
verdict of (premeditated) murder rather than manslaughter.^

Brune (1975:753) has pointed out that English Romani can be used as
a secret language by Rom to conceal what they are saying from other
Gypsies. Thus,

you chopped the grai, mush?

which literally means 'did you exchange the horse, mate?' is used, by pre-
vious agreement, to mean *did you steal the chickens?'

Other families have built up secret languages in different ways. The
Gilligoolie Smiths have composed a dialect based on a mixture of Romani
and the two secret languages of the Irish Travelers, Gammon and Shelta.^
The syntax and morphology are English, not Gaelic* The Wilsons
(Boswells) on the other hand have learnt new words from books and visiting
continental Romanies, to make phrases which no one but themselves and a
few widely traveled Romanologs can understand:

espiba yerefd gry 'chestnut-colored horse' (underlined words are
from Borrow's Spanish Calo vocabulary)

trin tawnie bauloes ta o boro dosch lobo 'three little pigs and the big bad

wolf (Tom Wilson [Boswell] , unpub. ms.)
The secretness of the language is one reason why it is not taught to young
children. If they don't know it, then they can't reveal its secrets. Another
reason is that they don't need it for any of the purposes mentioned above.
They do not go to work or attend wakes or sing in public. In fact they are
hardly permitted to talk at all when adults are around. It is significant that,
in a Romani-English word list compiled by a Gypsy (Wilson, forthcoming),
'behave' is translated as kakka 'don't'.

(7) Other uses: Romani English is common in oaths and terms of

endearment:

77/ more you 'HI beat you'

and the register here does contain caiques on Romani:

my daughter's life i.e., 'may my daughter die if I'm not telling the truth'

In tattoos, I have only seen one example

Devel kuska doika 'May God bless mother'

where the use of the dative ending -ka suggests it was copied from the arm

of an older man.

The significant aspect of Romani English is that it is not transmitted from
parent to child as languages generally are. The average six-year-old hardly

87
knows ten words of the lexis, and his knowledge does not exceed 50 before
puberty. At this point the girls learn the language from the younger women
and the boys from the younger men. During the long drives looking for work
a boy can learn as many as thirty or forty words in a day, and as he learns
them he gets into situations where he needs to use them and is allowed to
do so. There is of course a parallel to this transmission of the language by
older siblings and members of a slightly higher age-peer group in the way in
which, in many communities, singing games, standard riddles, words for
excretory and sexual functions are passed on not from parent to child but
by children and adolescents to younger children and adolescents. To this
extent the acquisition of the Romani register of English by a young Gypsy
boy or girl may be classed as a *rite de passage*.*

Romani Institute
London, England

NOTES

1. For a detailed account of this theory, see Hancock (1970) and Acton (1971:15).

2. ker ^Indian origin' and kenner Tinker's cant* both mean *house'.

3. Regina versus Willmont, Young and Harmsworth. Chelmsford, July 1975.

4. These are both formed by making phonetic changes to Irish words in a way to
which their name gives the key (like 'egg-language* and *back-slang*). Gammon
(itself a reversal of 'Ogam') mainly has reversal of consonants, and Shelta (from
Bearla-language) makes changes in the fust syllable.

5 . Edward Gentle told me about the Gilligoolie Smiths.

6. Peer-to-peer language transmission Cage-grading') was first discussed by Stewart
(1964).

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

The only other two books on the English Roman! dialect were
published over one hundred years ago (Borrow, Smart and Crofton),
and the conventional wisdom is that the language has declined ever
since; and indeed, even in the l870s people were complaining that
fluency was fast disappearing.

Obstinately and persistently, however, the language survives,
in a country where so many other immigrant tongues have faded and
disappeared within a generation or two- It has been primarily an
oral language; it lacks a written tradition; indeed, until recently
some 90?^ of Romanichals have been unable to read and write.
Individual Romanichals have used their language in private
correspondence, or have written down items to gratify the vrtiims of
scholars or evangelists, but they have not hitherto established a
literary tradition in Romanes, although Gypsy writers like Wood,
Odley and "Lavengro" have referred to their language in books
written primarily in English.

Today, however, around half of the Travelling children of
primary school age in England and Wales are being educated (D.E.S.
19^3); the foundations of mass literacy are being laid* Many
older primary school children and secondary school children want
to use their own language in school, but do not know where to
start. An abundance of written English is presented to them by
way of example, but Romanes - well, how should it be written ? -
how should it be spelled ? - has anyone else ever done such a
thing ?

This book is aimed first of all at such young people. It brings
together examples of texts which have been written in English
Romanes, and provides a working standardization for the spelling.
And because different Gypsies in different parts of the country
know words that others do not, we provide a vocabulary which can
help young people to read each other's writing.

HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

Since this book will be used in schools we wished to make it as
complete in scope as possible by including four of the most useful
recent articles that have been written about English Romanes*

There remains controversy over the date at which the English
Romani dialect was formed, and as to what kind of language it is.
In a debate at the National Gypsy Education Council conference at
Oxford (Acton 197l)> Professor Ian Hancock, himself a G^sy, argued
that it was formed in a fairly rapid process, similar to creoliz-
-ation, at the time of first language contact in the l6th and early
17th centuries. Against this Dr.Donald Kenrick argued that there
was a slow process of deterioration of inflected Romanes until by
the 19th century we are left with Romani English, a dialect of
English rather than of Romanes. Hancock asserts, however, that we
are still dealing with a dialect of Romanes, albeit one with mass-
-ive interference from English* This debate has continued for over
a decade, and we have included two recent statements by Kenrick
and Hancock which together present the present state of knowledge
about the history and grammar of the dialect in definitive
technical detail*

Romanestan Publications

ROMAN I

ROKKE RIPEN

TO-D I V VU S

The English Romani dialect and its

contemporary social, educational

and linguistic standing.

EDITED m mOMAS ACTON AND DONALD KENRICK

Romanestan Publications
First published IOS4

London
ISBN 947^03 00